Posts Tagged ‘Navalny’

For years, senior Russian officials avoided mentioning Alexey Navalny’s name on TV and in the press. It was hardly a sign of self-confidence and strength. This last Tuesday, Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s op-ed appeared in The New York Times urging Russian “democrats” to adopt the goals and priorities he favors (thanks to Tim Newman for pointing out … keep reading

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Jim Heintz and Natalia Vasilyeva report from Moscow Thousands of anti-government activists challenging President Vladimir Putin’s rule were protesting across Russia on Monday, with police arresting main opposition leader Alexei Navalny outside his Moscow home before he could reach the main demonstration and scores of others. It seems we’re talking about tens of thousands across the … keep reading

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Observer.com, formerly the New York Observer, reports from Russia: Thursday morning in a Moscow courtroom, YouTuber Ruslan Sokolovsky was sentenced to three and a half years probation for an August stunt in which he filmed himself playing Pokémon Go in church. In a Yekaterinburg courtroom, if I remember correctly. Sokolovsky’s YouTube channel had about 280,000 … keep reading

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Good reporting by Howard Amos, a Moscow-based freelancer, and Jim Heintz of Associated Press. Russians are taking to the streets under anti-corruption slogans, and not just in Moscow and St. Petersburg: Navalny and his Foundation for Fighting Corruption had called for the protests, which attracted crowds of hundreds or thousands in most sizeable Russian cities, … keep reading

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Wednesday’s predictable but nevertheless bizarre re-conviction of Navalny and Ofitserov makes one wonder how the court managed the seemingly insurmountable barriers such as the absence of the corpus delicti and the ECHR’s ruling. It’s especially puzzling if, as Navalny has observed, at least some of the ruling was pasted straight from the 2013 original, complete with the … keep reading

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It’s Groundhog Day for the Russian opposition and its informal leader: Alexei Navalny said the verdict at the retrial was copied word for word from his first conviction… As the judge read out the guilty verdict on Wednesday, Navalny tweeted out pages from the original verdict to support his claim that it had been copied word for … keep reading

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“The witch has lost: now everything is permitted” seems to be the operative motto of the day in the Kremlin and its environs. Thus, the de-facto leader of the opposition – the only opposition politician with presidential potential – is to be further harassed and, possibly, imprisoned on transparently bogus charges. Russia’s long slide to misery has … keep reading

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According to Radio Free Europe – Radio Liberty (here’s a report from the BBC): Russia’s economic development minister [Alexei Ulyukayev] has been charged with large-scale bribe taking and placed under house arrest following his detention overnight in a case that has sent shock waves through the country’s ruling elite. It appears to be a case of trumped-up … keep reading

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More notes on last Sunday’s Duma election in Russia. The elephant in the room. Alexei Navalny – the de-facto opposition leader in my view, although not in everyone else’s – was barred from running, as was his party. The silence of the urbanites. In the previous post, I called Russian non-voters political idiots, but in … keep reading

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Russian Channel One has run an unprecedentedly absurd “investigative” program accusing Alexei Navalny of working for Bill Browder and MI-6 since 2006, and claiming that Navalny, Browder and “agent Solomon” from MI-6 conspired to cause the death of Sergei Magnitsky, who died in the Butyrka prison in 2009. Amazingly, Russia’s Investigative Committee has announced an investigation … keep reading